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CHAPTER XXXVI: Maria
Add the salt and stock, or cream, and cook five minutes longer.-MARIA PARLOA.
1/2 teaspoonful pepper, Split-Pea Soup. 1 cupful split peas, 1½ quarts stock, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 tablespoonfuls minced onion, 3 tablespoonfuls chopped celery, 1 carrot.
Place a saucepan with split peas and stock over the fire; when it boils, add salt, onion, celery, and carrot; cover, and boil slowly until done; press the soup through the sieve; if too thick, add a little more water, season to taste with salt and pepper, and serve with small squares of fried bread.
Green-Pea Soup. 1 quart shelled peas, 3 pints water, 1 quart milk, 1 onion, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful flour, 3 level teaspoonfuls salt, teaspoonful pepper.
Put the peas in a stewpan with the boiling water and onion, and cook until tender, which will be about half an hour. Pour off the water, saving for use later. Mash the peas fine, then add the water in which they were boiled, and rub through a purée sieve. Return to the saucepan, add flour and butter, beaten together, and the salt and pepper. Now gradually add the milk, which must be boiling hot. Beat well and cook ten minutes, stirring frequently.-MARIA PARLOA.
SOUPS Winter Okra Soup (a New Orleans recipe). 1 can okra, 1 can tomatoes, 2 onions, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 dozen oysters, 3 tablespoonfuls rice, 1 red pepper pod without the seeds.
Chop the onions and fry them in the butter. Wash the rice well, stew the onions, tomatoes, and pepper together in about 3 quarts water and 1 pint oyster water for about three hours, stirring frequently. Ten minutes before serving, add the okra and let it come to a boil. Then drop in the oysters, boil up once, and serve.
Three soups run together on this page — split pea, green pea, and a canned-okra gumbo-adjacent soup from New Orleans. The pea soups are sound as written; the okra soup needs its timings read carefully.
- The hinge: the oystersIn the okra soup the oysters go in last and "boil up once" — that is the whole instruction and it is correct. Thirty seconds to a minute in liquid already at a simmer is enough; anything longer and they tighten into erasers.
- Oyster waterThe pint of oyster liquor is the liquid drained from shucked oysters (or from a container of shucked oysters). If you are buying a dozen oysters you will not get a pint from them; supplement with fish stock or bottled clam juice rather than plain water.
- Three hours is a long timeSimmering onion, tomato and pepper for three hours in three quarts of liquid is a reduction as much as a cooking time. Keep it at a bare simmer, expect to lose some volume, and watch for scorching.
- When the rice goes inThe recipe says to wash the rice but never says when to add it. Put it in with the tomato and onion stew for the last 20-25 minutes of the long simmer, not at the start, or three tablespoonfuls will disintegrate entirely.
- Canned okraFrozen cut okra behaves well here; it needs only the ten minutes the recipe allows. Fresh okra sliced thin will also work and gives more of the thickening the soup depends on.
- Red pepper podA hot red pepper pod, fresh or dried, with the seeds removed — not a bell pepper. Leave it whole and fish it out if you want less heat.
- Purée sievePurée's "purée sieve" is a medium-mesh sieve worked with a wooden pestle or spoon. A food mill on the medium plate does the same job, and a blender followed by a sieve gets closer to the intended texture than a blender alone (pea skins do not break down).
- Green-pea soup and the missing pepper measureThe ingredient list reads "teaspoonful pepper" with the fraction dropped in printing — almost certainly a quarter or half teaspoon. Season at the end by taste rather than trusting the line.
- YieldsThe split-pea soup makes roughly 6 to 8 cups, four to six servings; the green-pea soup, with three pints of water returned to the pot and a quart of milk, rather more. The okra soup, after its long reduction, gives something over two quarts.
Maria Parloa (1843-1909) ran a cooking school in Boston and was among the first principals of the Boston Cooking School, the institution that later produced Fannie Farmer; her Miss Parloa's New Cook Book and her pamphlet work for companies like Walter Baker made her one of the most widely reprinted American cookery writers of the late nineteenth century, which is why compilations such as this one lift her recipes wholesale and simply sign them. The okra soup is not hers — it is labelled a New Orleans recipe, and it belongs to the broad family of Louisiana okra soups from which gumbo takes its name ("gumbo" is generally traced to a Bantu word for okra, ki ngombo in Kimbundu, with cognates in related languages). What marks this version as late is the tin: "1 can okra, 1 can tomatoes" is a winter recipe because commercial canning had by the end of the century made a summer vegetable available in January, and the title says so outright.